Yesterday, on the last day of Paris Fashion Week, I dropped in on jeweller Marie-Hélène de Taillac, and we got to chatting about the price of gold. She said it had transformed her business.

First, it meant stones had become enormously more important. She showed me some little gold hoops decorated with minute gold “sequins” (very thin) discs the size of lentils, and then some much larger sparkling numbers of quartz and amethyst — really quite large amethysts — and asked which I thought was more expensive. They are pictured left.